When the Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, was shot by a Palestinian
assassin the other day, it was the first killing of an Israeli cabinet
minister by an Arab. It was not, however, the first killing of an Israeli
cabinet minister per se: an Israeli Jew assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin in late 1995.

Illogically, Ariel Sharon and his Knesset allies denounced the killing as an
"act of terror" and vowed retribution against the Palestinian population of
the West Bank and Gaza. We found this odd because we do not recall the
assassination of Rabin being called an "act of terror" nor do we recall
Israel vowing retribution against itself on that occasion.

At the same time, the murder reminded us of a number of questions concerning
"targeted killings" and when they are justified and when not. Indeed, the
day the killing took place the Wall Street Journal published a particularly
oafish piece, which sought to argue, more or less, that since our intent was
to destroy Osama Bin Laden, why shouldn't Israel be allowed to "target" as
many Palestinian terrorists as it likes?

It seemed to us that it might be useful to try to disentangle the terminology
of terrorism, assassination, targeted killings and related terms.

Terror and Collective Responsibility

Terrorism can be defined in a number of ways, but a key element has to do
with the attitude, and the position, of the perpetrator as well as the
victim. From an emotional point of view, "terrorism" is simply something
terrible, and in this sense the act has no meaning. Rationally speaking,
however, it is clear that terrorist acts are motivated by specific goals and
specific grievances.

But what are the goals of the terrorist? Here is where we have to change the
perspective and realize that what is experienced by the victim as "terror" is
meant as "collective responsibility" by the perpetrator.

Collective responsibility is one of the oldest forms of social control and
social manipulation known to mankind. The situation in which an entire
community, or some randomly chosen segment thereof, is destroyed for the sins
of a few is a very common theme throughout history. Communities and tribes,
even in the Bible, were not decimated or destroyed to the last man out of
blood lust. There was a calculated message being sent: the slightest
infraction of one will lead to the destruction of all, or at least an
arbitrary portion.

Collective responsibility, far from seeking the fragmentation of social
order, as Arendt argued, or being symptomatic of the "creeping rape of man"
as Buchheim has held, seeks to shape the target society to police itself so
that the party administering the violence can proceed unmolested. Of course,
while this is the basic aim of collective responsibility, anyone on the
receiving end will experience it as terror, because the violence is bound to
seem arbitrary and unpredictable, and will not be meted out on an individual
basis. Hence, "What did I do to deserve this?" is a typical response. This
is a legitimate response in our culture that has slowly come to esteem the
dignity of individual human beings. But we should always keep in mind that
the idea of the sanctity of the individual in a political sense is a
relatively new idea even in the West, and largely unknown outside of it.

It was precisely in the spirit of collective responsibility that the Germans
shot Belgian civilians in the First World War: the policy of
Schrecklichkeit was meant to force the Belgians to contain the snipers who
were harrying the German ranks. In this case, the Germans were simply
employing a strategy that had been employed numberless times by Europeans
against each other since the Dark Ages, whenever the threat of guerilla
warfare or chaos raised its head.

The same idea of collective responsibility lay at the root of the
Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign in World War Two against Germany,
as well as the American bombings of Japan. Together, these bombing campaigns
claimed the lives of more than one million people, people who were quite
clearly "innocent" on an individual basis of any war making. To be sure,
there were purported military considerations in many cases: oftentimes
"strategic" violence is just "collective responsibility" in new dress. Even
so, it is amply clear from the records and sometimes the explicitly stated
aims that an underlying purpose of many of these bombings and indeed the only
purpose of the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo was to impose
collective responsibility. Most of the bombing attacks on Germany were meant
to destroy "morale", that is, to cause the German people to turn against
their government, leading either its overthrow or to its unconditional
surrender. The purposes of the nuclear attacks were variously to compel the
Japanese government for the sake of its people, or to compel the people to
force their government, to sue for peace. An explicitly stated purpose for
the final fire bombing of Tokyo was to teach the Japanese that they should
never again make war against the United States.

The strategic bombing campaigns of World War Two also reminds us that there
is an ignoble side to the application of collective responsibility. That is,
while traditionally employed to shape an enemy society's policy, it is
sometimes used, in addition, because of a failure to succeed in face-to-face
encounters with the designated warriors of the target society. We should
keep in mind that the Anglo-American bombing of Germany was pursued partly
because of the frustrations of the western allies against their German
counterparts in the field. Indeed, it has often been pointed out that the
British bombed cities like Hamburg because their string of military defeats
made it impossible for them to harm the Germans in any other way.

Victims of the Allied bombing attack on July 24/25 1943

By the same token, the techniques of collective responsibility - like area
bombing - were often resorted to because of military failure. Monte Cassino,
Caen, and many other cities and towns in France, Italy, Holland, and Belgium
were leveled by British and American bombers - causing many thousands of
innocent civilian casualties - because of an inability to break through
German lines. Dresden was bombed, theoretically at least, because the Red
Army was tied up in its advance towards the city. Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were destroyed basically because it was felt that it was better to kill
200,000 innocent Japanese than to risk having any more young American boys
killed. So the threshold is crossed where collective responsibility, or more
accurately the techniques thereof, becomes a sign of weakness, or at least an
unwillingness to fight and die by the rules of ordinary warfare.

The Turn to Terror

It is at this point where we make the transition from collective
responsibility according to the usages of war to the "terrorism" with which
we are most familiar. And we also see the rationale that animates its cruel
violence. Unable to defeat the police, or the army, the terrorist strikes at
innocent men, women, and children in order to cause the surviving innocent
men, women, and children to cause their armed forces to lay down their
weapons or their governments to make appropriate changes in policy. It is
precisely in this manner, that is, as a form of collective responsibility,
that terrorism has been practiced since the late 19th Century: in France, in
Russia, in Palestine, throughout the Third World in our lifetimes, and, of
course, today in Israel, the United States, and again Palestine.

With regard to the 911 attacks on America, the mass murders were clearly
meant to get the United States to meet some specific goals, articulated by
Bin Laden himself: abandonment of American bases in Saudi Arabia, relaxation
of the embargo against Iraq, and the removal of the Jews from Palestine. (In
the last case, according to Joseph Sobran, the West Bank and Gaza are meant,
not the abandonment of Israel as such.)

Some of these goals might not be objectionable to some degree, if they did
not contradict geopolitical imperatives. For example, the Saudi bases are
necessary to prevent more Iraqi incursions, which would threaten the oil
supply and then the world economy. So this goal, for example, could not
easily be met. Furthermore, it is politically and perhaps morally impossible
for Israel to be abandoned altogether, although a case can easily be made
against continued Israel occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Yet such musings are problematic in this case for at least two reasons.
First, because acquiescence to applied collective responsibility, either in
the form of terror or in common usage, means that one has lost the war, and
losing a war brings with it all kinds of consequences that one should
carefully consider before surrender. Second, the scale of destruction, loss
of life, and cruelty of the mass murders of September 11 is so out of
proportion to the specific grievances that it oversteps any conception of
collective responsibility or terrorism to become sheer madness. There can be
no parley with such people: they must be destroyed.

At the same time, we shouldn't have any illusions about the consequences of
our stance against terror, or more accurately collective responsibility in
the terrorist mode. Stirring pronouncements against it cannot disguise the
fact that collective responsibility is a typical mode of warfare that has
been used by all those who decry it today. To claim that collective
responsibility via indiscriminate bombing strikes is just, while collective
responsibility through truck bombs, hijackings, or suicide bombings is not,
is essentially to argue that the weak have no right to attack the strong. Of
course, we can be hypocrites about the whole matter, which is the easiest
path: we will baptize our collective responsibility as right, and that of our
enemies wrong, and declare any comparison "moral equivalency." That may
satisfy the masses, but that is an utterly futile way of addressing the
problem. The weak will always fight against the strong, especially if the
strong is overbearing, arrogant, or greedy; and they will use whatever
weapons they can find. In the short term, of course, we can kill. But in
the long term, we must address the inequalities.

Terrorism in Israel

The situation is slightly different in Israel. There, the Israelis have
occupied territories since 1967 that the United Nations has repeatedly
claimed that Israel has no right to inhabit. This is important, because the
United Nations ratified Israel's existence itself. In effect, Israel uses
the authority of the United Nations to justify its existence on half of the
original Palestinian Mandate, and then defies the authority of the United
Nations to occupy the other half. Israel has repeatedly built settlements,
accommodating hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews, throughout these
occupied territories. Israel has seized all of the water in the region, and
doles out to the native Palestinians a fraction of what the ground holds.
Finally, Israel repeatedly seizes Arab land for further settlements or
"security zones", destroys Palestinian homes, crops, orchards, and olive
groves, sometimes as a policy of collective responsibility, sometimes in
order to build access roads to its illegal settlements, and sometimes, it
appears, out of sheer spite.

Under these conditions it is only natural that the Palestinian population
would object, and that has been the root cause of the two uprisings
(intifidas) that Israel has faced. Of course, we can see on our TV's how
Israel carries out collective responsibility on its end: with battle tanks,
armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters with rockets, and F-16 fighter
jets. The Palestinians do not have such weapons at their disposal, so they
use what they can get: rocks, guns, the occasional grenade or mortar, and
most recently suicide bombers.

Of course, the Palestinians, divided into their separate cells, have no hope
in defeating any contingent of the Israel Defense Forces face to face. They
are outnumbered and outgunned. For this reason, the Palestinians have been
compelled, not only to resort to a policy of collective responsibility, but
also a policy of killing mostly innocent civilians. Yet their aim is not
mere murder: their aim is to retaliate against the IDF, which they cannot
defeat, and also to influence Israeli public opinion to call off its
warriors, and leave the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

Proof that these are indeed the limited aims of the Palestinians, rather than
the total destruction of Israel, is shown by the fact that the first intifada
came to an end when the Israelis accepted the Oslo process in 1993. At that
time, the Palestinians explicitly accepted the right of Israel to exist in
exchange for a return to the pre-1967 borders. The second intifida, on the
other hand, began after the Camp David meetings in 2000 during which the
Israelis made it clear that they had no intention of returning to the 1967
borders, a position punctuated by a provocative and tactless visit to the Al
Aqsa mosque by Ariel Sharon.

The Israeli reaction, meanwhile, has been to hold the entire Palestinian
population collectively responsible for the violence of fanatic sectarians.
True, the Israelis have used largely non-lethal means in penning the Arab
population into essentially large prison cantons. At the same time, they
have penalized the entire Palestinian population by refusing any further
dialogue or any further concessions. In the process they have killed some 700
Palestinians, including many innocents bystanders, and a large majority who
were shot dead simply for the unforgivable crime of throwing rocks at their
jailers.

Even so, the actions of the Palestinian suicide bombers in particular have
been, in our opinion, at times clearly over the line that separates an
inevitable struggle for human rights from gratuitous destruction.

A Moment of Clarity

And indeed there are innocents dying, on both sides. Just as collective
responsibility and terror are two sides of the same coin, depending on who's
giving and who's getting, so now "murder of innocents" and "collateral
damage" are also to a large extent terms determined by our perspective. Some
say that there's a difference: "murder of innocents" is deliberate, while
"collateral damage" is simply a by-product of the larger objective. This
would be scant comfort to those murdered in New York. After all, it is clear
that the terrorists mainly wanted to destroy the World Trade Center, to
destroy a symbol, and inspire terror. If they had wanted to kill, they would
have flown later, and lower. But it would be impossible to characterize our
fellow citizens murdered that day as "collateral damage," it would violate
any standards of humanity and decency. Quite so: just like the term itself.

Now this finally leads us back to the killing of Rehavam Zeevi. Once again,
we have a dual terminology. If one accepts the validity of the homicide, it
is a "targeted killing." On the other hand, if one objects, it is "murder"
or an "assassination." However, it must be said that it was not an act of
terror. It was not carried out as an act of collective responsibility: on
the contrary, Zeevi was singled out as an individual for his often expressed
contempt for Arab aspirations. Nor was it carried out in order to influence
either Israeli public opinion or the Israeli government. In fact, the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) claimed that the killing
was carried out to avenge Israel's killing of its own leader, Mustafa Zibri,
in a helicopter missile attack on August 27.

It follows then that the death of Zeevi, however unjust, and however
deserving of our sympathy, was not an act of terrorism at all. If anything,
it was reminiscent of a gangland execution carried out in retaliation for the
gangland execution that preceded it, and so on, back to infinity, and
perhaps, forward as well. It is precisely for these reasons that the United
States, heavily stung by assassinations in the 20th Century, constantly
rebukes Israel for its "targeted killings" because it knows where such
killing leads. It leads to endless killing, and ultimately the collapse of
the rule of law. That should be a sufficient moment of clarity for anyone.